Reading: Selections from "The Great Vision" in Black Elk Speaks

This morning we have read from what has been called the Native American Bible, probably the most powerful religious text produced by the great native religions of the territory that we call the United States. What I want to do here is not to tell you what this vision means – you'll have to figure that out for yourself, but to tell you a bit about what happened to the vision. The prophet who speaks here is Black Elk. Black Elk was a member of the Oglala Sioux tribe of Native Americans, a people that once roamed the great prairies in search of buffalo. Black Elk was 9 when he had the vision that I read from today. He had the vision, but like many nine-year-old boys, he didn't tell anyone about it. He didn't tell anyone about it for a long time, until he was seventeen. In the years between, he had grown from a boy to a man. When he was thirteen, in 1876, he witnessed the Battle of Little Big Horn, the biggest victory for the Sioux in a long and tragic history of conflict with the whites. Let me back up a second and give a little of the history of this conflict, courtesy of Encarta Encyclopedia:

"The Sioux fought on the side of the British during the American Revolution and the War of 1812. In 1815, however, the eastern groups made treaties of friendship with the United States, and in 1825 another treaty confirmed Sioux possession of an immense territory that included much of present day Minnesota, the Dakotas, Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, and Wyoming. In 1837 the Sioux sold all their territory east of the Mississippi River to the United States; additional territory was sold in 1851. At this time a pattern of assault and counterassault developed as settlers pushed forward onto Sioux lands. The first clash was in 1854 near Fort Laramie, Wyoming, when 19 U.S. soldiers were killed. In retaliation, in 1855 U.S. troops killed about 100 Sioux at their encampment in Nebraska and imprisoned their chief. Red Cloud's War (1866-1867), named after a Sioux chief, ended in a treaty granting the Black Hills in perpetuity to the Sioux. The treaty, however, was not honored by the United States; gold prospectors and miners flooded the region in the 1870s. In the ensuing conflict, General George Armstrong Custer and 300 troops were killed at Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876 by the Sioux chief Sitting Bull and his warriors. After that battle the Sioux separated. The massacre by U.S. troops of over 200 Sioux men, women, and children at Wounded Knee in December 1890 marked the end of Sioux resistance until modern times."

The encyclopedia, of course, is the record written by the Wasichus, the whites, but even in the stark sentences of this history, you can see some of the injustice and the grievances visited upon the Sioux. They had originally roamed the prairies free of any restrictions, and wanted only to live with the land and hunt the buffalo. They were pressured into a certain territory, and it was promised that they could lie there, and then this promise was cruelly broken. What this encyclopedia tells from the Wasichu point of view, Black Elk tells from the Sioux point of view in the book from which I read, which is a record of conversations he had in 1930 with a poet named John G. Niehart, a white man.

The first thing to say about Black Elk's vision is that it was real to him. It happened to him while he was sick, in fact his parents thought he was going to die. But after he recovered from his sickness, he did not dismiss his vision as a hallucination. No, it was more real to him than the world in which he lived. Here is what he said about it right after his illness left him:

"Everybody was glad that I was living, but as I lay there thinking about the wonderful place where I had been and all that I had seen, I was very sad; for it seemed to me that everybody ought to know about it, but I was afraid to tell, because I knew that nobody would believe me, little as I was, for I was only nine years old. Also as I lay there thinking of my vision, I could see it all again and feel the meaning with a part of me like a strange power glowing in my body; but when the part of me that talks would try to make words for the meaning, it wouldbe like fog and get away from me."

Have any of you had that problem in trying to explain a dream or a feeling that you've had? Sometimes the words simply won't come to communicate what you've experienced deep down inside. But that doesn't mean that it's not real. Only that you can't explain it. Listen to what Black Elk says:

"I am sure now that I was then too young to understand it all, and that I only felt it. It was the pictures I remembered and the words that went with them; for nothing I have ever seen with my eyes was so clear and so bright as what my vision showed me; and no words that I have ever heard with my ears were like the words that I heard."

In other words, what Black Elk is telling us is that the things he saw and heard in his vision were realer to him than the things he saw and heard in everyday life. This is common in people who experience the Holy in their lives. Many consider the Holy, the unseen world, the world occupied by God, is more real than the everyday world. But it is harder to see. This is why people retire to monasteries or convents or go off by themselves, to try to put themselves in touch with the holy.

We stand outside Black Elk's vision, so we can't experience it as he did. But one thing is remarkable no matter where we stand: this man remembered an awful lot of detail in 1930 about a vision he had in the 1860's when he was 9 years old. What I read you this morning is less than a third of the vision he describes, which takes up 27 pages in the book. Here is what Black Elk says about the remembering:

"I did not have to remember these things; they have remembered themselves all these years. It was as I grew older that the meaning came clearer and clearer out of the pictures and the words; and even now I know that more was shown to me than I can tell."

Black Elk finally told of his vision when he was seventeen. By that time he had participated in the Battle of Little Big Horn and actually killed soldiers and taken scalps. In the years after Little Big Horn, the Oglala Sioux had been seriously oppressed by the Wasichus. The Wasichus imprisoned and then killed the young and warlike chief Crazy Horse, after which the Sioux became dispirited. The Wasichus wanted the Sioux to live in towns, and a large number of them started out toward a settlement, but then Black Elk's family and some other split off from this group and started toward Canada, where Sitting Bull was in exile. Through many adventures Black Elk discovers that he has powers of prediction. He hears voices predicting a certain thing is about to happen, and then he warns his family and they get out of there and then the dangerous thing happens.

Living with his vision became intolerable for Black Elk. You see, the circumstances of his people were getting worse and worse. In the vision, he seemed to have been given some sort of a command to lead his people out of their misery. Yet he could not fulfill this role as long as he told no one. But he didn't just come to this realization on his own. Rather, the voices made life miserable for him:

"I was afraid to see a cloud coming up; and whenever one did, I could hear the thunder beings calling to me: 'Behold your Gradfathers! Make haste!' I could understand the birds when they sang, and they were always saying: "it is time! It is time!" The crows in the day and the coyotes at night all called and called to me: "It is time! It is time!'

"Time to do what? I did not know. Whenever I awoke before daybreak and went out of the tepee because I was afraid of the stillness when everyone was sleeping, there were many low voices talking together in the east, and the daybreak star would sing this song in the silence: 'In a saced manner you shall walk! Your Nation shall behold you!'"

His parents, worried that the old sickness might be coming back to him, take him to a medicine man named Back Road, and Black Elk finally breaks down and tells Back Road about his vision. Back Road thereupon decides that what is needed is to re-enact the vision in a dance. So they get all the horses they can muster, and people to play all the principle parts, and they put together a Horse Dance that replays Black Elk's vision. Black Elk related the vision in detail and they had all the songs and actions assigned to the different people. But in the middle of the ritual, a strange thing happened. A black cloud appeared in the west, and Black Elk sent a voice to the spirits of the cloud. Then all the horses started neighing. Then the vision itself came back to Black Elk:

"Then suddenly, as I sat there looking at the cloud, I saw my vision yonder once again – the teepee built of cloud and sewed with lightning, the flaming rainbow door and underneath, the Six Gandfathers sitting, and all the horses thronging in their quarters; and also there was I myself upon my bay befofe the tepee. I looked about me and I could see that what we were doing was like a shadow cast upon the earth from yonder vision in the heavens, so bright it was and clear. I knew the real was yonder and the darkened dream of it was here."

Black Elk relates that once his vision was reenacted in this ceremony, its power was released to be useful in the world. He found that he had powers to heal people, and he set about doing this for many years. But he was not solving the overall problems of his people:

"When I thought of my great vision, which was to save the nation's hoop and make the holy tree to bloom in the center of it, I felt like crying, for the sacred hoop was broken and scattered. The life of the people was in the hoop, and what are many little lives, if the life of those lives be gone?"

So he signed on in 1886 to Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, hoping that the travel that it brought might give him some answer:

"Maybe if I could see the great world of the Wasichu, I could understand how to bring the sacred hoop together and make the tree to bloom again at the center of it."

He had even thought that maybe the ways of the Washichus were better than the ways of his people. But after the show arrived in New York City and he saw how things were, he put these thoughts out of his mind. Here is what he said:

"We stayed there and made shows for many, many Wasichus all that winter. I liked the part of the show that we made, but not the part that the Wasichus made. After a while I got used to being there, but I was like a man who had never had a vision. I felt dead and my people seemed lost and I thought I might never find them again. I did not see anything to help my people. I could see that the Wasichus did not care for each other the way my people did before the nation's hoop was broken. They would take everything from each other if they could, and so there were some who had more of everything than they could use, while crowds of people had nothing at all and maybe were starving. They had forgotten that the earth was their mother."

From New York, Black Elk went with the Wild West Show to London, and spent three years all told with the show before returning home in 1889. Upon his return, he found his people in worse shape than ever. The Wasichus had forced the tribe to give up even more land.

In the late 1880's some Native Americans did begin to believe in a Messiah figure that would deliver them from the Wasichus, but it was not Black Elk. It was a Paiute Indian from Nevada named Wovoka. Wavoka's vision was that a new world was coming that would come out of the west and crush everything in this world like a whirlwind. It would restore all the lands to the Native Americans, bring dead Indians back to life and restore the herds of buffalo. There would plenty of meat for everybody.

Wovoka received a delegation from the Sioux, and he directed them that they must go back to their people and put on sacred red paint and dance the Ghost Dance, which he taught them. When the delegation came back to the Sioux, this became all anyone talked about. The people were desparate.

By the following year, the legend had grown. Wovoka was considered the son of the Great Spirit; when he had come to the Wasichus a long time ago, they had killed him. But he was coming to the Indians this time. Wovoka was Jesus come back. Black Elk heard many wondrous things about Wavoka, but did not know whether to believe them or how they connected with his own vision. Some of the Sioux started doing the Ghost Dance, and strange things began happening. People who danced had seen their dead relatives and talked to them.

Black Elk heard about a Ghost Dance that was going to take place on Wounded Knee Creek. When he got there, he could hardly believe what he saw, because so much of his vision seemed to be in it:

"The dancers, both women and men, were holding hands in a big circle, and in the center of the circle they had a tree painted red with most of its branches cut off and some dead leaves on it. This was exactly like the part of my vision where the holy tree was dying, and the circle of the men and women holding hands was like the sacred hoop that should have power to to make the tree to bloom again."

Black Elk joins in the dancing, and after the second day, he begins to have new visions himself, visions in which he is transported to another world. He takes some of the details of these visions, such as the designs of the makeup and the shirts that the people are wearing, and he re-creates these for the dancers.

The Sioux dance the Ghost Dance at Wounded Knee and elsewhere for the late summer and fall of 1890. But they are making the Wasichus nervous. At first they attempt to ban the dance altogether, but then they try to restrict it to 2 days a month, and say that the Indians need to work the rest of the month. The problem is, there are no jobs.

Then Sitting Bull is killed. The next highest Chief, Big Foot, is ill with pneumonia. On a cold December day, the Soldiers demand that all of the Sioux give up their weapons. One of the warriors, outside the tepee of the ailing Big Foot, refuses the order. A struggle ensues, and the weapon goes off, killing a soldier. This results in a massacre, one of the most shameful episodes in American history. Most of those killed at Wounded Knee that day in 1890 were unarmed women and children.

Black Elk was there, but Black Elk was powerless to prevent the slaughter. Here is what he says about it in the end:

"I did not know than how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the corrked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream. And I, to whom so great a vision was given in my youth, – you see me now a pitiful old man who has done nothing, for the nation's hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead."

So Black Elk, despite the vision, did not save his people. But then, neither did Jesus save the Jews in a worldly sense. For Jesus was crucified and the Jews continued to suffer under Roman oppression. Indeed, the Romans crushed a Jewish revolt in the year 70 of the Common Era which destroyed the temple, the focus of Jewish worship.

Yet the message of Jesus did not die with him, for we still read his words today. And I think the nation's hoop lives on, as a vision. What happened to the Sioux was tragic, and the consequences live with us still. The Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota has the highest poverty rate in the nation, and heads many other social pathology indexes as well. Yet because Black Elk told his story to John Niehardt in 1930, millions of Native Americans and non-Indians have been privileged to share this vision.

I am not a Native American, yet I would like to think that we can all come to know the earth as our mother. And I would like to think that we can learn that

"The sacred hoop of my people [is] one of many hoops that ma[ke] one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center [grows] one flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father."

And that, like Black Elk, we can see that it is holy.

Amen.